Helmut Rix, Etruscan Language, in: Brill's New Pauly. Antiquity, Volume V (Equ–Has), Leiden-Boston 2004, pp. 90-92.
A. Sources and Script E. is known to us from roughly 9,000 texts from the period 700 BC to AD 10, as well as from c. 40 glosses. With the exception of a → liber linteus on the bindings on an Egyptian mummy, containing thefragment of a description of a ritual, all the texts are inscriptions: funerary, ownership, votive, gift and manufacturing inscriptions and annotations on paintings. Most come from Etruria itself, others from neighbouring regions, a small number from outside Italy. The script uses an alphabet taken from a pre-700 BC Western Greek prototype (X = ks, not kh) and is in turn the origin of the Latin alphabet (C = k as in E., which had no voiced consonants, not g like the Greek γ). There is therefore no problem with reading the texts phonetically. B. Methodology E. is certainly no longer an unknown or even enigmatic language. However, as we have not come across any well-known language to which E. is related, ready access to a comparison of words and forms ('etymological' method) is restricted to the marginal area of loan words (e.g. Latin satelles from E. zatlaθ, E. pruχum from Greek προχουν acc 'pitcher'). In general, in working from short texts, one has to try to determine the 'message' of a text from its context, dissect this into elements, correlate the elements to the words of the text Text sample: opening lines of the dedicatory inscription Pyrgi A 1''1'ita''.''2' tmia''.3'' ica4c''.5'' he2rama''σ''va 6vatie''χ''e 73unialas8''.'' tres 9''θ''emia4sa 10meχ11''.'' θ''uta12.'' θ''efa5riei13. velianas. 14sal 156cluvenias16.'' turu7ce''. ... 1-5subject, nominative: suffix -0; 1;3demonstrative pronouns; 4conjunction; 5plural: -(χ)va; 6preterite passive: -χe; 7ablative II: -''al''-''as''; -''tra''? abl. I: -''i''s; preterite participle.: -''sa''; 10ablative III: -0.; 11uninflected adjective; 12-''i'' uncertain; 13gentile name; genetiv I: -''s''; 14predicative; 15attribut, gen.I; 16preterite active: -''ce''. »1This ~ 2cult room 4and 3these 5statues 6were wished for 7 by Juno 8?... 9having built 10from11his own 10patrimony 12Tiberius 13Veliana 16dedicated (this) 14as? 15of? . . . . « The numbers in superscript refer to the lines of the right-to-left inscription, while the subscript ones refer to the syntactic analysis. and check against occurrences in all the other texts ('combinatorial' method); archaeology, linguistics and knowledge of text structures in historically adjacent languages can help this process. The few longer texts are only partly intelligible using that approach, but the majority of shorter texts are almost completely intelligible. Our knowledge of the vocabulary is also fragmentary; our knowledge of the grammar on the other hand is considerable. C. Language The E. phonology contains four vowels and no voiced consonants; the value of θ, χ and φ is a matter of conjecture. Morphologically, E. is (still) largely agglutinative: case and number of a noun, for example, are each indicated by a suffix: clan 'son', genitive clen-''s'', plural clen-''ar'', gen. pi. clinii-''ar''-''as''; loc. in -i (zilc-''i'' 'in ? office') can also be formed from the genitive: clen-''ar''-''as''-''i'' at the sons' place. Nominative and accusative are differentiated pronominally, mi : mi-''ni'' 'I' : 'me'. The verb shows tense and voice but not person and number, am-''e'' : am-''ce'' 'is/am' : 'was'; mene-ce 'made', passive mena-''χe''. The meaning of some words is clearly discernible (puia 'wife', θu zal ci 'one, two, three', but can only be approximate or vague in others (zusle 'a sacrificial animal', alee perhaps 'gave'). Glossography; → Italy: alphabetical scripts; → Italy: languages; → Personal names: Rome and Italy; → Lemnos-Stele Editions: CIE, 1893 ff . (not yet completed); M.Pallottino (ed.), Testimonia linguae etruscae, 21968 (Selection); ET. Literature: 71984, 402- 517 (Ger.: Id., Etruskologie, 1988, 379-487, 506-509); H. Rix, Schrift und Sprache, in: M.Cristofani (ed.), Die Etrusker, 1985, 110-238; L. Agostiniani, Contribution a I'erude de I'epigraphie et de la linguistique etrusques, in: Lalies 11, 1991, 37-74. Bibliography with reproductions: Editio: CIE, 6314 (with photos); H. Rix (ed.), Etr. Texte, 2 vols., 1991, no. Cr 4.4.; Literature: M.Cristofani, Sulla dedica di Pyrgi, in: E. Acquara (ed.), Studi in onore di S. Moscati, 1996, 1117-1116.